Some Other Timeline
Thurisaz timeline, total lunar eclipse
Three of Cups Compound, somewhere in what was once the State of Virginia
“The scars on your back. How did you get them?”
She hadn’t answered the last dozen questions he’d asked, and Raven didn’t expect her to answer this one either. He moved carefully toward her, thankful that he was alone with her—and still alive.
The woman known as Lilah Burns squatted naked on the big boulder in the courtyard, dead center of the compound of old shipping containers stacked three deep as a damned near impenetrable fortress against the warring factions outside. As a testament to a world on the brink of destruction, soft ashes fell on her bare shoulders, on the ground, on him. Her back was to him and covered in ridges of scars that curved upward like the wings of an angel. Tonight was the night, his only chance, and the full moon overhead had already begun to dim as the eclipse painted it deep red. Another such eclipse would not occur in this lifetime.
“I command you to answer me!”
Raven held his breath and clutched The Book of Time to his robed chest. He had no authority to command anything. Not yet. But he’d try anything. According to the prophecies of the long-dead god Daegan, an empath was critical to ushering in a new age for Earth, needed as much as the winged Angelseed chimera and nanotech-enhanced soldiers a past High Priestess of Daegan had thoughtfully prototyped as a next step in evolution. An empath as an early warning system against threats, winged humans to dominate the air in warfare, and super-soldiers to control the ground. Just to survive. The human race had to adapt—and quickly—to what would otherwise be an extinction event, but a demon-possessed empath too fucked up to fulfill her destiny? Worthless.
Raven gave his head a little jerk, and the hood of his robe fell backward. He brushed one palm over his topknot of long brown hair, checking to see if the sticks that held it in place were still there in case he needed to remember his earliest training and turn them into deadly flying darts at a moment’s notice. He cleared his throat and tried again.
“I command you to answer me!”
At first, silence. Then she turned her head just enough to look at him over one shoulder. Her thick, dark hair hung in dirty clumps across her collar bones and half-hid the madness in her red irises. All around her head swirled a silvery glow, like runes and ancient markings, though too faint to distinguish the language or meaning.
“Priest.”
Ears ringing, Raven nodded in surprise. The voice didn’t sound so much like a woman’s as an echo of several voices. A vibration perhaps within the swirl. The symbols around her head glowed in her scarred flesh.
“Lilah.”
“Lilah is not here.”
“Of course, she is. I can feel her.” Raven steadied himself. This was more than he’d expected. He wasn’t bred by the Daeganean priesthood to be a super-empath as Lilah Burns had been, but he still had the ability. Among other talents. “I can feel you, too.” The Lilah inside was far weaker but still there. Still enough of her to save.
She grinned. “I can feel you as well. Lord Aryx!”
Raven swallowed and fought the instinct to back away. “Yes. I’m Lord Aryx, High Priest of Daegan.”
She nodded. “The Last Priest of a dead god. We both know what that means.” She wrapped her arms around her chest, digging her long, jagged fingernails into her shoulder blades and tearing new wounds in perfect parallel to the old scars, four cuts on either side, bleeding. “Is it the human-angel half-breed you want? Or an empath? Do you think you can have both?”
“I need only the empath.” For now. He kept his voice even. She was toying with him. Rather, the demon inside was toying with him.
She shook her head as she shifted on the rock to face him. “Nay. You do not even know, do you? You must have both if you are to ascend.”
“You’re lying.” The truth was, he wasn’t even sure what ascension entailed, only that he was destined for it by virtue of being the last of the line. His mentor, Terre, had warned him that he would be physically changed and might lose himself, but it was a necessary sacrifice expected of the honored position as Last Priest.
“I never lie.” The grin widened. “Does that surprise you, Young Aryx? That demons do not lie? We do not need to. The human mind tells all the lies for us, and yet you fault us because you refuse to be held accountable for your own actions.”
They stared at each other for a moment. Raven searched his heart and felt the truth. He had to get rid of the demon in her body and keep the empath. The last dregs of humanity, altered as they were since the planet had shifted poles, depended on him.
“In the name of—”
She laughed. “You cannot cast me out.”
“I assure you—”
“And I assure you that you cannot. You are the one who brought me forth. I have kept my word. You have not.”
Raven shook his head. He’d never worked with demons, let alone evoked one. “You must be thinking of someone else.” Jakin Crutchfield. Maybe even Terre Vanderholt.
She regarded him through half-lidded eyes, then nodded. “Yea, verily. Your word is true. A different Lord Aryx. An incarnation from long ago. Still you. Still a contract you have not paid when I have fulfilled the terms of our agreement to your satisfaction. Until you, whether in that old form or this one or in some other, have fulfilled our agreement, you are in my debt.”
With a worried glance at the blood shadow on the moon, Raven edged closer. Time was running out.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Only because you do not want to know. See what I mean about the lies of men? You can deny your responsibility and blame it all on me because you refuse to look at who you are.”
Was this what other priests had meant when they referred to the unsettling smooth talk of demons? He’d read all the journals hidden away in Daeganean libraries, and they all complained of silver-tongued devils.
Raven shifted uncomfortably in his boots and gripped the half-burned book even tighter. “I know exactly who I am.” He could cite his pedigree back three thousand years and more and remembered slivers of incarnations for at least half that. “I am Lord Aryx, of Lady Aoife, of Lady Siobhan, of—”
“As I thought.” She waved away his words, revealing the glowing runic scar on Lilah Burns’ wrist. Hagalaz. The rune of both destruction and creation. “You have not studied your craft enough to know your complete destiny.”
“I assure you—”
“Why must you insist on assuring me? Of anything? Know that you have not. Neither assured me nor studied your destiny well enough. You never wanted the priesthood. Nay, verily you never wanted to be the Last Priest… the harbinger of the death and rebirth of this world. Did Aoife not teach you all she should? Do you ever wonder why that is?”
Stay strong, Raven told himself. Demons throughout history were known for tempting men. This one had to be lying. Had to be. Even though Raven empathically felt the truth in the words. Only Aoife, his High Priestess, knew how much he’d railed against joining the priesthood, though in hindsight, Terre Vanderholt, his High Priest and mentor, may have had some idea.
She braced herself, one palm flat on the rock as she leaned forward. “Recite your pedigree all you want. That’s only your line of initiation and elevation. But with each initiation, you swear on your soul to reincarnate into the Order of Daegan, and so you do and so you have. Each time as Lord Aryx, and each time, you make promises in exchange for gifts I bestow on the Order.”
“I don’t make deals with demons.”
She laughed. “You made a deal with Aoife, and that is worse. She had control over you then and will again when you become a vessel for Daegan’s return. Search your heart, Young Aryx. You’ve always known that angels and demons will fight for dominion over this Earth, maybe on the same side. Maybe against the human race, or maybe in spite of it.”
Raven gritted his teeth. He’d been born into the priesthood. His gifts were both natural from his parents and supernatural from his initiation and subsequent elevations from priest to High Priest. He’d never intentionally delved into his past lives with the priesthood, but as much as he loathed the admission, he knew to his core that the demon spoke the truth.
She nodded, reading his mind. “If you are too distracted to scry into a bowl of holy water for visions of your past, I will show you myself the contract we made on—”
She jerked her head up, hearing something or seeing something that had not yet happened. A split second later, the entire compound shook. Raven fell to the ground, but she remained steady atop the boulder.
“They have found you,” she said quietly.
Soldiers with nanobots in their blood. And humans with the injected DNA of an ancient Chaldean prince in their bones and in their wings, derived from an archeological site Siobhan Jung had plundered in Iraq. Angelseeds. One, at least. And Aoife, planning and plotting for power as always. It would’ve been nice to have an empath on his side to sense them. Lilah Burns had been born to be a human antenna in the next age of the planet, but madness made her useless.
There was that prophecy, too, that the Last Priest of Daegan would love both an empath and an angel, that the empath would point the way to the angel, and that together, they would be the key to his ascension, when the last living priest initiated would, in accordance with prophecy, become the physical vessel of Daegan, whom some called Archangel Michael.
But he had little knowledge of and no feelings at all—except pity—for the mad woman in front of him. So little of her left, and all he could feel of her was pain, as though she were already in hell.
Still on the ground, Raven fumbled with the book, unwrapping the cloth around it quickly, spreading the dirty linen over the scorched grass to protect the already burned edges of the outer cover. He rifled through blank page after blank page of parchment until he found one near the end, the first of several, with a single sigil in black ink.
Raven plucked the sticks out of his bun and placed them on the ground next to The Book of Time. His dark hair fell to his shoulders and forward over the open pages. He pushed up his sleeves, exposing the Walking Lightning bind rune on his right wrist, the tattooed symbol of the Priesthood of Daegan.
“You cannot change your past.”
He could feel the demon’s agitation. “Not trying to. Just the present.”
“You do not understand how the book works. You cannot directly change the timeline.”
A lie. Or if not a lie, a misdirection. He’d found the book in a Daeganean library in Dublin before the shift of Earth’s poles. He’d also located multiple references to it in the priesthood’s lesser libraries, in both personal grimoires and in accounts of supernatural experiments. The experiments probably accounted for most of the blank pages since each page’s sigil faded once it was used, whether or not the priest or priestess using it made the required sacrifice to keep the changes they’d made to their timelines. The dozen or more of the priesthood who had experimented before him reported changes, though not always how the world had changed, and some never reported whether the changes were desired.
The demon had good reason to talk him out of using the book: if he did it right, the demon would be gone and only Lilah Burns, the empath, in front of him. Then she would be ready to lead him to the angel who would ordain him as Daegan-the-God reincarnated. She was probably quite pretty when she was sane. Certainly, a different person from the tortured soul he could discern now. With her by his side, he’d have a clear path to ascension. And maybe to the prophesied softness of love.
“If you interfere with the unfolding of events, you will be disappointed in the results of your folly,” the demon warned. “This I know. I can see across all possible timelines. I exist across time.”
Omnipresence, as the Order called it. “All time is now.” All priests and priestesses could see significant memories within in their own lifetimes if they chose, but most did not. Insanity and obsession lingered for those who looked too far into their futures. Only this demon could see not merely one lifetime but all timelines within that lifetime. No human could comprehend, and Raven feared to try.
She braced again for a second and then third explosion. Ash and sparks rained down between them.
Raven glanced up at the reddening eclipse. The future was so fluid, the past so set. He had only the present, but it was a different present he needed. He had to jump a timeline, and time was running out. As far as he was concerned, the eclipse window would be open only for tonight. The author of The Book of Time had been explicit in his instructions and the circumstances of the spells, and the last pages of the book would yield results only when the sun and moon were in a particular astrological degree as they were tonight.
He leaned forward on his knees and elbows and then blew the ash off the parchment with ragged breaths. He jerked his head backward to whirl his hair out of the way. With one last deep breath, Raven set his intention and pressed his bind rune tattoo into the sigil on the page.
In an instant, he knew the demon had been right.
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